Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Does you organization have a test department that still use a gigantic Word document or Excel spreadsheet to document all paths through a system and makes its human testers manually click through everything on a web site or rich client application? Several people I work with mentioned that on a recent project they used a test department that demanded a complete script of what buttons they need to click, what data to enter, in what order, and what results to expect. They then set the testers loose. Apparently all these testers did was to follow the "happy trail" and magically the application passed with flying colors! Of course the reality was much uglier, since they really didn't exercise the application either in terms of executing all potential paths thought the user interface, entering erroneous data, or load testing the application.

I submit that any testing team that insists on having humans manually click through a scripted session and manually type in the results is absurd, a waste of valuable time and money, and ultimately adds zero value to the software development effort and probably adds negative value.

There are tools out there to automate many of these repetitive tasks. The only one I ever worked with was Rational's Robot product, and that was back in 2001. It allowed you to record the interactions with an application and perform assertions on the results of those interactions. That allows you to automate regression tests in the same way developers can re-run all their JUnit tests at the touch of a button. From a brief visit to the Robot web site it appears to be able to do a lot more now, including web applications. I also found this article about using the Rational Robot automation framework support (RRAFS) and another link off that page to the Software Automation Framework Support project on Sourceforge.

In any case, please do your company a favor and let someone know there are lots of tools to automate many aspects of functional testing!